Canada's largest dinosaur skeleton is now on display after being tucked away and forgotten in the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum for 45 years.
The barosaurus, nicknamed Gordo, is the key attraction at the Toronto museum's newly renovated dinosaur galleries, which opened Saturday.
The barosaurus had a body typical of sauropods, featuring a small head, thick body and whip-like tail.
(CBC)
The bones had been stored but not properly catalogued until ROM curator David Evans found reference to their location in a recently published article he stumbled upon in Utah.
The discovery came as he was doing research ahead of a planned trip to Wyoming, where his team planned to investigate the possibility of digging up a barosaurus.
"Quite ironically, we were searching for one of these [bones] to fill a gap in our exhibit and we didn't think we had one here, so as I was trying to track one down I read an article, and it led me right back here to my very own collection," he told CBC News.
"It was an absolute eureka moment," Evans said. "It said what I was looking for was right back here" at the ROM.
When he returned from the trip, he started poking around in the museum's paleontology collections and found the lower end of a barosaurus arm bone in one drawer.
"The other end of the arm bone was actually scattered another 50 feet away on another shelf," he said. "I remember bringing over that one piece of arm bone and seeing another half of an arm bone and taking that one end and putting it on, and it fit perfectly, like a jigsaw puzzle."
What he initially thought were isolated, random bones from different dinosaurs turned out to be a "strikingly good chunk" — or about 40 per cent — of a single barosaurus skeleton, Evans said.
It turns out that the pieces were dispersed around the collections room due to various moves.
The plant-eating dinosaur measured 27 metres in length and weighed 15 tonnes. It had a small head, massive body and whip-like tail. Scientists believe it lived about 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period.
"This is the only real sauropod skeleton to be mounted in Canada, the largest dinosaur skeleton on display in Canada, and the only real fossil barosaurus mounted in the world," the ROM says on its website.
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